Monday, March 26, 2012

There's something really refreshing in the almost irresponsible choice of casual moments from life in Israel and Palestine as shown in Life's a Blast by Linda Forsell.

Especially when you compare it with so many responsible choices of iconic moments done by many others.

"I started look­ing at what was going on around me, and in a pro­ce­dure of learn­ing I was all the time tak­ing pic­tures. This is not an objec­tive or polit­i­cal story, it’s per­sonal, and it’s not the entire pic­ture of the con­flict, it is about what I learnt of being a Pales­tin­ian in Israel and Pales­tine today."

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

If we had to look for a founding myth in photography, a single image which weighed on every other photograph like none other, then probably the choice would be Roger Fenton's The Valley of the Shadow of Death. That single photograph encapsulates the main obsessions that both the theory and practice of photography faced over and over throughout the decades.

First its title has both the words 'shadow' and 'death', two ghosts which always haunted the photographic world, and no digital revolution proved able to chase away. Then it has the world 'valley', the epitome of the ambition photography always had of capturing the shapes of our world. Also, the different versions Fenton shot of the image paved the ground for the endless debate about truth in photography - what can be considered true in a photographic image, what is real and what is not (read an interesting essay by Errol Morris on the subject).

Finally, the The Valley of the Shadow of Death is about war, and photography, for better or worse, has always been feeding on it.

In the eternal return represented by Fenton's image, I will just pick three examples from three Italian artists, each of them working on a different war which made the history of our country, each of them choosing to show the invisible presence of the past in today's landscape:

Giorgio Barrera, Battlefields 1848 - 1867

Francesco Ratti, La Battaglia di Palestro

- Giorgio Barrera in his work Battlefields 1848 - 1867 went back on the sites of the main battles dof the Risorgimento, when Italy became one nation after three wars of independence. "This photographic pilgrimage retains a nation’s collective memories and deep-rooted histories by ascribing new meanings to public space. Inspired by maps from the period were used to plot out this journey and the style of Renaissance painting, Barrera’s images show “what is, after what has been.”

Paola De Pietri, To Face

- With To Face, Paola De Pietri went looking for traces of the Italian World War I front in the alps dividing separating Italy and Austria. "Now these places have become popular holiday destinations, an oasis of peace and meditation. It is difficult to find under your footsteps the echo of the battles and the drama which took place almost a hundred years ago. The innocence of today seems to have erased the violence of the past".

Recovering bodies after the Benedicta massacre, 1944

- Andrea Botto's The Memory Room is a collection of traces from a brutal nazi-fascist retaliation carried on between Genoa and Alessandria in 1944 against groups of Partisans. It shows objects from their past, old photographs, portraits, and landscapes. "Tidy landscapes where the drama of the past is clearly glimpsed through a complex system of symbolic elements: a heavy rock placed at the base of the frame, a broken branch, some furrows in the ground and the fog blurring the horizon fill a void and provide the semantic foundation on which the spectator's interpretation is based."

Monday, March 12, 2012

Almost a year and a half of "uninterrupted, unaccompanied travel", from the North to the South end of the world, across the endless stretch of land of the Americas: Danish artist Adam Jeppesen gave himself the task to turn this enormous portion of our planet into one single body of work, a sequence of images which has become The Flatlands Camp Project, now on show at The National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen. And almost unaccompanied are also the photographs of this work, introduced by little more than the simple description of the effort of Jeppesen's wandering.

The first thing that came to my mind visiting the exhibition was exactly the disproportion between the immensity of the subject matter and the limited space provided by an exhibition to convey the scope and the length of Jeppesen's work.

The photographs show only natural, almost pristine landscape, where the perception of time does not come from the places we see, but it unfolds like physical layers over the surface of the photographs. Scratches cover most of the prints, as if bearing witness of the months of travelling, with little defence against the elements slowly penetrating the films and the camera.

Jeppesen chose to further emphasise this feeling of precariousness by printing many large photographs using a xerox copier, then carefully pinning the photographs on their frames, as if they were specimens from a distant time.

One room presents a videoprojection of the slow movement of the prow of an icebreaker ship sailing through frozen waters, the equivalent in motion of Jeppesen's elusive photographs.

A dark photograph lit by countless white scratches shows a camping tent lost in the night, the only trace of human life, offered with a blurred self-portrait, with Jeppesen's figure effaced by a long exposure.

Only at the end of the exhibition I realised that those strong manipulations of the photographs, between the xeroxing, the nailing and the scars on the prints, seem like the most natural choice to present what remains in one man after such a long journey: pretending to capture the existence of all that land can only be vain, and the sole thing that survives is just the fragile memory of what we saw, the places merging into one another, the scars left on our skin.

Then, when we come back home, we draw something down on a paper, quickly before our memories fade away, we pin it on the wall and we take a step back to look at it, and remember.

Friday, March 9, 2012

I was thinking about something to write about Zhang Xiao and his work Coastline, which is about the coast areas of China (you can find a portfolio on the latest issue of Rear View Mirror Magazine), when I ran into Irina Rozovsky's website, a young Russian photographer I did not know, where among many interesting series I noticed some images of people spending time at the sea. The resonances between her beach photographs and Xiao's massive body of work triggered an endless research of photographs about ways of inhabiting the space near the sea.

I decided to borrow the beautiful method used by Landscape Stories of devoting each issue to a pretty simple concept, around which they gather a selection of artists (their latest issue is online now, Trees). One of their first issues was called The Lure of the Sea, and so I toyed a little bit with their idea and created a sequence of images specifically about people by the sea, one for each photographer, mixing quite freely between recent and old work, young guns and shining stars of the photography world. Honestly I could have gone on forever, this is just an example of the crazy things happening when you start playing with free associations in photography.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Hard to get a better insight into how they were produced,but Paul Rousteau's images from his work La Grotte des Apparitions were realised using street views fro the pilgrimage hotspot of Lourdes. The result reminds a little bit of those blurry images taken from enlargements of those casual photographs supposed to prove the existence of the snowman or some aliens, or at least that is what I thought, since I saw some kind of faces also in them. Interesting operation on iconography and religion though, carried on also in another work by Rousteau, The Book of The Holy Face, where he juxtaposes passages from the Bible with manipulated vernacular images taken from social networks.

Make sure you check out also the rest of his personal projects, lots of dark humour and alienation, à la Martin Parr but with a French twist, if you know what I mean.

Monday, March 5, 2012

After a ten-minute walk from the train station of Humlebæk, a small city 35 km north of Copenhagen, just when you thought you got lost then you find this sign, indicating the nearby entrance of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark's most visited museum and, according to Wikipedia, the 90th most visited museum in the world (is that a mark of honour or a low ranking? Hard to say).

The museum received its name from the first owner of the property, who had three wives all named Louise (it might be interesting to know something more about this man's story). After you pass the gate, you are greeted by a small and elegant courtyard, making you feel like you are entering the mansion of some wealthy local. Once you walk in, then the place starts unfolding itself, as if the facade was hiding it from view.

You get a first glimpse of the real place visiting the stylish gift shop, from which the surrounding park and the Øresund, the water strait separating Denmark and Sweden, reveal themselves.

Then you begin exploring the alleys and the exhibitions rooms, walking into groups of Alberto Giacometti's statues eager to guide you in and out of the several buildings (four, five?) popping up behind luscious trees. Sculptures by Alexander Calder lead you down to the shore, where you might be able to see the coast of the Swedish province of Scania.

Until you meet one more Giacometti creature, in the peculiar company of a photograph by Andreas Gursky, who after all is the main reason I came to visit this magic place.

Will the two be happy of the mutual company? They seem to keep some distance between themselves.

Gursky's show at Louisiana presents 40 large prints and several smaller works, spanning from the early '90's to the Oceans and Bangkok series, from 2010 and 2011 respectively.

The large prints obviously dominate the space, attracting people with the same kind of curiosity you see around the big animals at the zoo: we saw them many times in photos or tv, but never in flesh and blood, this close, this big. This is especially true for the heavily digitally assembled images from the recent years, posing a stark contrast with photographs from the 90's, where not only the technique seem more 'analogue', but also Gursky's vision does, more aimed at critically reading the real space in front of him, rather than reinventing it for his own images. This obviously translates into an increasingly complexity of his images over the years, both in terms of representations and in terms of the final objects, with bigger and bigger prints year after year.

But in the end I was really fascinated by the small prints in the exhibition, mostly from earlier years, where the compression of Gursky's vision in the reduced format adds a conceptual touch to the images, not revealing everything of them but still sharing the same god-like vision of the bigger ones - a subdued approach that makes his images a bit more philosophical and less spectacular.

The show rightfully opens with Rhine II from 1999 (above), Gursky's images recently sold at Christie's for the record sum of $4.3m, and it ends with the above mentioned Bangkok and Oceans series (you can seen one from the Bangkok series next to the reluctant Giacometti's statue). In addition you have a single puzzling piece of work called V&R, also from 2011, showing a group of models walking on a runway at a fashion show, probably the first ever work by Gursky where a reduced depth of field is used to enhance the subject of the image (ie the models, with a blurred audience in the background), rather than the usual clinical rendition of every small detail.

Andreas Gursky, V&R, 2011

All these latest works by the German artist seem to share the same kind of unbalance between intention and result, where the increasing freedom of his images from the burden of recording reality does not fully translate in increased creativity or freedom of imagination. The Bangkok series presents dark images of liquid surfaces where we detect the presence of debris and pollution, but the work seem to be conceived more to induce simple aesthetic admiration rather than inviting to think about the environment it seems to evoke (read here for an interesting collector's point of view).

Andreas Gursky, Bangkok VII, 2011

Andreas Gursky, Ocean VI, 2010

The Oceans series has a more interesting premise, digitally recreating satellite images of those water surfaces we never get to see, neither photographed nor witnessed with our own eyes in their vastity. The fashion show image looks simply flat, carrying the usual glacial gaze on consumerism Gursky accostumed us to see in his work, but lacking the epic which marks his best production, as this image seems to suffer from a digital composition of elements which fail to really merge in a complex and unified scene.

Ai Weiwei, Fountain of Light, 2007

Once again less is more appears to be the lesson here, or at least that's what Ai Wei Wei seems to suggest from the park of the Louisiana museum, with his sparkling version of the utopic Monument to the Third International: grandeur can be fragile, hiding a small heart behind its luxurious facade.